Saturday, October 17, 2015

This weekend’s must-read essay is Henry Kissinger’s analysis
of the current turmoil in the Middle East: “A Path Out of the Middle East
Collapse.”

As would be expected, Kissinger exhibits a significant and
welcome depth of knowledge about the region’s history, the character of the
combatants and the geopolitical fault lines. Next to his analysis, the current
administration looks feeble minded. Of course, it is also and equally possible that this administration looks kindly on Islamist regimes and sees no reason not to grant them what they wish.

To be fair, the leading Republican presidential candidates
have yet to demonstrate anything like a real understanding of the situation. It
is impossible to deal effectively with a situation that you do not understand.

Anyway, Kissinger opens by suggesting that the
administration’s Iran nuclear deal, deal whose purpose was to stabilize the
region, has done no such thing. Moreover, it has caused American influence in
the region to diminish significantly. Everyone in the region understood that
America had caved to the ayatollahs and was withdrawing from the region, its
tail between its legs:

The
debate about whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran regarding
its nuclear program stabilized the Middle East’s strategic framework had barely
begun when the region’s geopolitical framework collapsed. Russia’s unilateral
military action in Syria is the latest symptom of the disintegration of the
American role in stabilizing the Middle East order that emerged from the
Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

This is a useful counterweight to administration happy talk
about how great it is that Putin is getting himself into a quagmire. Rarely has
an administration so shamelessly rationalized its own craven inaction.

People who do not know very much about much of anything have
compared Obama’s Iran deal with the Nixon administration China deal. Allow
Kissinger, a major architect of the latter, to explain the differences:

The
prevailing U.S. policy toward Iran is often compared by its advocates to the Nixon
administration’s opening to China, which contributed, despite some domestic
opposition, to the ultimate transformation of the Soviet Union and the end of
the Cold War. The comparison is not apt. The opening to China in 1971 was based
on the mutual recognition by both parties that the prevention of Russian
hegemony in Eurasia was in their common interest. And 42 Soviet divisions
lining the Sino-Soviet border reinforced that conviction. No comparable
strategic agreement exists between Washington and Tehran. On the contrary, in
the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accord, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei described the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and rejected negotiations
with America about nonnuclear matters. Completing his geopolitical diagnosis,
Mr. Khamenei also predicted that Israel would no longer exist in 25 years.

Forty-five
years ago, the expectations of China and the U.S. were symmetrical. The
expectations underlying the nuclear agreement with Iran are not. Tehran will
gain its principal objectives at the beginning of the implementation of the
accord. America’s benefits reside in a promise of Iranian conduct over a period
of time. The opening to China was based on an immediate and observable
adjustment in Chinese policy, not on an expectation of a fundamental change in
China’s domestic system. The optimistic hypothesis on Iran postulates that
Tehran’s revolutionary fervor will dissipate as its economic and cultural
interactions with the outside world increase.

Kissinger explains that in the aftermath of the 1973
Arab-Israeli war, America (that would be Nixon and Kissinger) exerted more influence
in the region. We cobbled together a balance of powers that gave
some stability for a period of decades.

In his words:

In the
aftermath of that conflict, Egypt abandoned its military ties with the Soviet
Union and joined an American-backed negotiating process that produced peace
treaties between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Jordan, a United
Nations-supervised disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria, which has
been observed for over four decades (even by the parties of the Syrian civil
war), and international support of Lebanon’s sovereign territorial integrity.
Later, Saddam Hussein’s war to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq was defeated
by an international coalition under U.S. leadership. American forces led the
war against terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf States were our allies in all these efforts. The Russian military
presence disappeared from the region.

Without assigning blame to the current or past
administrations, Kissinger describes the new geopolitical realities in the
Middle East:

Four
states in the region have ceased to function as sovereign. Libya, Yemen, Syria
and Iraq have become targets for nonstate movements seeking to impose their
rule. Over large swaths in Iraq and Syria, an ideologically radical religious
army has declared itself the Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL) as an
unrelenting foe of established world order. It seeks to replace the
international system’s multiplicity of states with a caliphate, a single
Islamic empire governed by Shariah law.

Enter the bear. The Russian bear, in particular. After listening
to the Obama administration pooh-pooh Putin’s intervention, it is refreshing to
read a cogent and informed analysis:

These
conflicting trends, compounded by America’s retreat from the region, have
enabled Russia to engage in military operations deep in the Middle East, a
deployment unprecedented in Russian history. Russia’s principal concern is that
the Assad regime’s collapse could reproduce the chaos of Libya, bring ISIS into
power in Damascus, and turn all of Syria into a haven for terrorist operations,
reaching into Muslim regions inside Russia’s southern border in the Caucasus
and elsewhere.

The situation is complicated:

On the
surface, Russia’s intervention serves Iran’s policy of sustaining the Shiite
element in Syria. In a deeper sense, Russia’s purposes do not require the
indefinite continuation of Mr. Assad’s rule. It is a classic balance-of-power
maneuver to divert the Sunni Muslim terrorist threat from Russia’s southern
border region. It is a geopolitical, not an ideological, challenge and should
be dealt with on that level. Whatever the motivation, Russian forces in the
region—and their participation in combat operations—produce a challenge that
American Middle East policy has not encountered in at least four decades.

Where is America in all this? Dazed and confused would
describe it well:

American
policy has sought to straddle the motivations of all parties and is therefore
on the verge of losing the ability to shape events. The U.S. is now opposed to,
or at odds in some way or another with, all parties in the region: with Egypt
on human rights; with Saudi Arabia over Yemen; with each of the Syrian parties
over different objectives. The U.S. proclaims the determination to remove Mr.
Assad but has been unwilling to generate effective leverage—political or
military—to achieve that aim. Nor has the U.S. put forward an alternative
political structure to replace Mr. Assad should his departure somehow be
realized.

American retreat, as many have noted, created a power vacuum.
Obama has been fiddling while the Middle East burns:

Russia,
Iran, ISIS and various terrorist organizations have moved into this vacuum:
Russia and Iran to sustain Mr. Assad; Tehran to foster imperial and jihadist
designs. The Sunni states of the Persian Gulf, Jordan and Egypt, faced with the
absence of an alternative political structure, favor the American objective but
fear the consequence of turning Syria into another Libya.

Kissinger is not very optimistic about the ability of the
players in the current conflict to maintain a balance of power, especially with
Iran having been granted eventual permission to develop nuclear weapons. This
Obama action will most likely induce the other players in the region to do the
same:

But the
current crisis is taking place in a world of nontraditional nuclear and cyber
technology. As competing regional powers strive for comparable threshold
capacity, the nonproliferation regime in the Middle East may crumble. If
nuclear weapons become established, a catastrophic outcome is nearly
inevitable. A strategy of pre-emption is inherent in the nuclear technology.
The U.S. must be determined to prevent such an outcome and apply the principle
of nonproliferation to all nuclear aspirants in the region.

How should we deal with the crisis? Kissinger suggests that
we begin by defeating ISIS. He adds that American retreat is a powerful
terrorist recruiting tool. The point is worth underscoring because so many
members of the pusillanimous peanut gallery has been insisting that Gitmo and
videos and Israeli settlements are major terrorist recruiting tools:

The
destruction of ISIS is more urgent than the overthrow of Bashar Assad, who has
already lost over half of the area he once controlled. Making sure that this
territory does not become a permanent terrorist haven must have precedence. The
current inconclusive U.S. military effort risks serving as a recruitment
vehicle for ISIS as having stood up to American might.

He adds that territory currently controlled by ISIS should
be returned to Sunni control. This will require the participation of the other
Sunni nations in the region and some very skilled negotiation.

He has other suggestions, but I will leave those to you.

Kissinger concludes:

The
U.S. must decide for itself the role it will play in the 21st century; the
Middle East will be our most immediate—and perhaps most severe—test. At
question is not the strength of American arms but rather American resolve in
understanding and mastering a new world.

The situation in the Middle East is difficult and extremely
complex. Only a president who understands the region in depth will be able to
deal with it effectively. Such an understanding requires a lifetime of study and hard work. It cannot be required through a
crash course in history.

The challenge for both political parties, but especially for
Republicans, is to find a candidate who has a depth of experience in foreign
affairs. Today, America’s foreign policy is being run by rank amateurs. This
offers Republicans a great opportunity to put forward a candidate or candidates
who understand the region and its history and who knows how to conduct foreign
policy. It cannot be comprised on sound bites and debate zingers.

If a candidate cannot do better than to promise that he will
learn it all within the next year or so, he is simply offering four more years
of amateurish muddle. By now America knows that the amateurs in the White House
have produced an extremely dangerous situation in the Middle East. Since the
Obama administration does not understand what is going on, it has chosen to
withdraw. A winning Republican candidate will be one who brings foreign policy
experience to the debate.

1 comment:

Stuart: The situation in the Middle East is difficult and extremely complex. Only a president who understands the region in depth will be able to deal with it effectively. Such an understanding requires a lifetime of study and hard work. It cannot be required through a crash course in history.

This statement sounds sensible, but rather hopeless. Obviously a president IS NOT and CAN NOT be an expert on everything he (or she) makes decisions on, rather a president has to be wise enough to choose experts who have spent a lifetime of work in a certain domain to offer expert advice. Well, someone like Kissinger we presume.

On the other hand, even experts have their biases. And we can imagine many people BECOME experts on a given field of study because they have a personal connection to it, and perhaps a personal tragedy from their past that they want to resolve through their access to power.

Or perhaps like Bush calling Saddam as "The guy who tried to kill my dad." A leader should NOT be making political decisions based on personal grudges. And as soon as a leader (or expert advising a leader) "makes it personal", we all should take heed that this is not an unbiased person capable of objective awareness of reality on this subject.

Kissinger himself might have biases in his assessments for being born in Germany after World War I, and having to escape Germany with the rise of the Nazi's. So those experiences can be a point of experience and wisdom, but it might also be a point of vulnerability.

It is interesting that the U.S. has not had a Jewish president in our history (not Lutheran either), but of course Jews have wide access to power, and including strong representation currently on the Supreme Court.

Would America "trust" a Jewish president? Ben Carson said we shouldn't trust a Muslim president, unless he foreswore allegiance to the Constitution over the Koran, but Jews also have their Israel to protect. Can we trust a Jewish president to put his allegiance to the United States even at the cost of Israel's survival, if at some point Israel's interests diverged from ours?

Well, John Kennedy had the same predicament as the first Catholic president, and we decided to trust the pope wasn't pulling his strings. Maybe a Jewish president is possible too?